Against Secundinus the Manichaean

Your goodwill toward me, which appears in your letter, is welcome to me. But as much as I ought to love you in return, since you love me, so much am I saddened that you have clung tenaciously to false suspicions, partly against me, partly against the truth itself, which cannot be changed. What you think untruly about my mind I easily disregard; for what you think, even if I do not recognize it in myself, can still happen in a human being. So even if you are mistaken about me, you are not mistaken in such a way that your opinion removes me from the number of human beings, since you believe of me what can happen in a human mind, even if it has not happened in mine. So there is no need for me to try hard to take this suspicion away from you. For your hope does not hang on me, nor will you be unable to be good unless I am. Think of Augustine whatever you like, provided only that my conscience does not accuse me in the eyes of God. For, as the apostle says, “to me it is a very small thing to be judged by you or by any human day.” But I will not repay you in kind by daring to think anything ill of your mind, which I cannot see. Nor do I say that you wished to wound me craftily; I think of you only as much as you show of yourself in your words. Therefore, although you have suspected things of me that are not good, namely that I left the heresy of the Manichaeans from a fleshly fear of some harm that might befall me from your fellowship, or from desire for the honor I have obtained in the catholic Church, nonetheless, not thinking ill of you in return, I believe your suspicion is well-meant, and I think you wrote this not in order to accuse but out of zeal to correct. But if you granted me the goodwill of believing me, since you are charging the hidden places of my mind, which I certainly cannot bring out before your eyes and show, you would easily change your view about it and would no longer wish to assert rashly what you do not know.

For I admit that I left the Manichaeans out of fear, but out of fear of those words spoken through the apostle Paul: “The Spirit,” he says, “says plainly that in the last times some will depart from the faith, paying heed to seducing spirits and teachings of demons, in the hypocrisy of liars, having their conscience seared, forbidding marriage, abstaining from foods which God created to be received with thanksgiving by believers and by those who have known the truth. For every creature of God is good, and nothing is to be rejected that is received with thanksgiving.” Although with these words he may perhaps have described other heretics too, still he described the Manichaeans above all, briefly and plainly. Out of this fear, then, when, after the mind of boyhood, I came late to wisdom, I tore myself away from that fellowship. I also admit that I burned with love of honor so as to depart from there, but of that honor of which the same apostle says: “But glory and honor and peace to everyone who does good.” And who will try to do good who thinks that evil lies not in a changeable will but in an unchangeable nature? Hence the Lord himself said to those who thought they spoke good things while they were evil: “Either make the tree good and its fruit good, or make the tree bad and its fruit bad.” And to the evil now changed into good the apostle says: “For you were once darkness, but now light in the Lord.” But if you will not believe me about my mind, think as you like; only take care what you think about the truth itself. “Let no temptation take hold of you but what is human.” For it is a human error to believe that what could have happened in my mind has happened, even if it has not happened; but when you think that a sacrilegious Persian fable, not only utterly false but utterly deceitful, woven and made up with most defiled lies not about just any human being but about the highest God, is the truth, this must not be passed over in this way, nor such a death of the soul disregarded. For there is something that can be done with you, since it is not as with my mind, about which I can say nothing more than that you should believe me, and if you will not, I find nothing to do. So too, when you think something false about that very light of minds which rational minds behold the more calmly the purer they are, it can be shown to you, if you listen patiently, how very far from the truth is what you think. For just as I cannot perceive the sensation of your eye, nor you that of mine, but we can only believe or not believe each other about this, while we can show each other the appearance that lies visible before the eyes of us both: so about the affections of our minds, which we have as our own, let us believe each other if we please, and if we do not please, let us not; but the reasoning of truth, which is neither mine nor yours but set before both of us to contemplate, let us attend to together, with the fog of obstinacy laid aside and our minds made clear.

I will bring forward no other proofs by which Mani's error appears than from your letter. You write that you give thanks to the ineffable and most sacred Majesty and to his Firstborn, the King of all lights, Jesus Christ. Tell me, of what lights is Jesus Christ king? Of those he made, or of those he begot? For we say that God the Father begot the Son equal to himself, but created through him, that is, founded and made, a lower creation, which is certainly not what he is who made it and through whom he made it. And so, since he made the ages through him, he was rightly called by the apostle King of the ages, as higher than the lower and powerful to rule, ruling the things that need rule. But when you call Jesus Christ King of lights: if he begot them, why are they not equal to the one begetting? And if you say they are equal, how is he their king, since a king must rule, and it can in no way happen that the things ruled are equal to the one by whom they are ruled? But if he did not beget these lights but made them, I ask from what he made them. If he propagated them from himself, why then are they lower? Why have they degenerated? But if not from himself, tell me from what? Or perhaps he neither made nor begot the lights over which he reigns? Then they have their own origin and nature, but certainly a weaker one, so that they either allow themselves or desire to be ruled by a more powerful neighbor. If that is so, do you not recognize that, apart from the race of darkness, there are now two natures, one needing the help of the other, but neither depending on the other's principle? This opinion you will surely reject, since it is utterly opposed to Mani, who tries to persuade people not of two natures, the King of lights and the lights that are ruled, but of two natures, the kingdom of light and the kingdom of darkness. You will take refuge, then, in saying that these lights were begotten. When I ask there why they are weaker, you will perhaps try to maintain that they are equal. But when I reply, “What is the reason they are ruled?” you will deny that they are ruled. To this I will answer: “Why do they have a king?” Here I do not see what remains for your candor except to regret having put such a door in your letter, through which you yourself cannot get out. But even when you have regretted it and said that Mani ought not to be thought defeated because you put something rather incautiously in your letter, I will read out countless passages from Mani's books where he calls it the kingdom of light, which he established as naturally contrary to the kingdom of darkness; and not kingdom, but kingdoms, since in that very letter of the ruinous Foundation, when he was speaking of God the Father, he says: “no one in his kingdoms being needy or lowest.” But where there are kingdoms, who is so blind as not to understand that kings can in no way be equal to those over whom they reign? What, then, is so close at hand, if you would notice it, and so fitting to the honesty of your heart, as not to regret having put that in your letter? For Jesus Christ is most truly the King of lights that are in no way equal to him but subject to him, and the ruler of those blessed ones. But rather regret that you were a Manichaean, all of whose deceiving devices the truthful front of your letter overturns with a single battering blow. For since Christ is King of lights, and did not beget from himself lower beings to be king over, nor take to himself neighbors to reign over which he neither begot nor made (lest there be two kinds of good, neither of which is from the other, nor one needing the other, which is foreign to the path of truth), it remains that God did not beget the lights over which he reigns, which are certainly good, because they are lower, nor usurp them, because they are their own, but made and founded them.

If you wish to ask from what he made them, and begin to imagine the help of a matter which he himself did not make, so that the Almighty would not seem able to make what he wished unless something he had not made helped him, you will again suffer inextricable fogs of error. But if the prophetic sayings are joined, by a sober stroke of understanding, most fittingly to the sublime and ineffable Majesty, “He spoke, and they were made; he commanded, and they were created,” you will thus see in what sense it is said in the catholic faith that God made all things very good out of nothing. For if he made them from something, then certainly either from himself or not from himself. But if from himself, then he did not make but begot. Why, then, did he beget lower beings? For unless they were lower he could not be their king. If not from himself, then certainly not from something which he himself did not make; otherwise he made them from something foreign, and there was already a good which he himself had not made, out of which he might establish a kingdom for himself. If that is so, he begins not to be the creator of good works, since there was a good which he had not created; for he would not produce the lights over which he would reign from a foreign evil. It remains, therefore, that even if he made them from some thing, he made them from that which he himself had already made.

So it follows that we must admit that God made the first origins of the things to be founded out of nothing; unless perhaps, since you said that Jesus Christ is the Firstborn of the ineffable and most sacred Majesty, not according to his taking on of a human being, in which he deigned to have brothers called by adoption, as the apostle says and as the catholic faith believes, to whom he would be firstborn, but rather according to the very excellence of his divinity you want him understood as firstborn, so that those lights in which he reigns are his brothers, not made by the Father through him but begotten by the Father after him, so that they are later-born and he firstborn, yet all of the Father's own and same substance. If you believe this, you first contradict the gospel, where he is also called only-begotten (“and we saw,” it says, “his glory, as of the only-begotten of the Father”), which would in no way be said truly if his eternal power and divinity too, by which he is consubstantial with the Father and is before all creation, had brothers of the same substance. And so, since the divine words testify that he is both only-begotten and firstborn (only-begotten, because without brothers; firstborn, because with brothers), you will not find how to understand both of him according to the same nature of divinity. But the catholic faith, which distinguishes between creator and creature, suffers no difficulty of understanding in these two names, taking him as only-begotten according to what is written, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” and as firstborn of all creation according to what the apostle says, “that he might be the firstborn among many brothers,” whom the Father begot for him into brotherly fellowship not by equality of substance but by adoption of grace. So read the Scriptures: nowhere will you find it said of Christ that he is Son of God by adoption. But of us it is read very often: “You have received the Spirit of adoption as sons”; “awaiting the adoption, the redemption of our body”; “that we might receive the adoption as sons”; “he predestined us to adoption as sons”; “a holy nation, a people for adoption”; “he called you through our gospel to the adoption of the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ”; and whatever such texts occur to one who remembers or reads. For it is one thing to be the only Son of God through the Father's excellence, another to receive through merciful grace the power to become sons of God by believing in him. “He gave them,” it says, “power to become sons of God.” So they were not so by nature, since they received the power to become so by believing in him whom, the only one, he did not spare but handed over for us all, so as to make him only-begotten with himself and firstborn toward us. By the fact, then, that he is only-begotten, he was born not of flesh, not of blood, not of the will of a man nor of the will of the flesh, but of God; but by the fact that he was made firstborn among brothers in the Church, the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. We too, insofar as we were by nature children of wrath, that is, children of punishment bound by the chain of mortality, although by his creating and establishing, who without doubt disposes and forms all things from the highest to the lowest in measure and number and weight, were nonetheless born of flesh and blood and of the will of the flesh; but insofar as we have received power to become sons of God, we too are born not of flesh and blood nor of the will of a man nor of the will of the flesh, but of God, not by a nature that makes us equal, but by a grace that adopts us.

Next, even if I were now to grant that Christ Jesus is not the only Son of the Father according to a divinity of the same substance, but has brothers born after him, to whom he would be firstborn, how can he be their king? I ask you, would you dare to say that he was born stronger because born earlier? You would certainly be ashamed to think so. But you do not think so. What then do you think? Make your mind gentle and yourself open to considering the truth without obstinacy. For I will ask this of you too: how do you understand Jesus Christ as firstborn in that divine, best, and eternal substance? Was he begotten first in time, so that we are to understand those to whom he is firstborn as born at a later time in that kingdom (and though we could not say by how many hours or days, months or years, the one who arose first is older, we should still think these generations separated by some interval and span of time); or are we to take him as firstborn not in time but in the very excellence of a certainly more sublime majesty, by which he also earned to be king to his brother lights, as if begotten into some sovereignty? If you answer that he is earlier and older than his brothers in time, so as to maintain that kingship over his brothers was conferred on him because he preceded them in being born, and at some time existed when they did not yet exist, what are you saying, brother? Will you hurl your heart over this cliff of impiety, so as to think that the changeableness of time befalls that divine and highest nature, and to believe that something exists there which did not exist before? Or, because the lights had to go forth from there against the race of darkness, do you call those goings-forth themselves “generations,” which you think took place in time, so that the fighting might take place in time? Could not one light, then, have sufficed to carry out that whole business of war by divine power? Or if many were needed, are we to think this of spiritual beings, that the entrance was so narrow that they could not go out at the same time, so that because one of the brothers went out first, he earned both to be called firstborn and to be made king over the rest? I will not pursue each point in detail, lest I be too burdensome to your able mind, which sees everything from a few things. So raise the keen gaze of your mind, wipe away the clouds of contention, and you will surely see that no movements according to places or times, no goings-forth, risings, settings, or any changes can take place except in a changeable creature; and yet unless that creature were from God, its craftsman and founder, the apostle would not have said: “And they worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever.”

In this saying, then, there are two things above all that are necessary, which I ask you to look at with me: first, that if the creature were foreign to God, God would not be called its creator by the apostle; second, that if creator and creature were of one and the same substance, those who served the creature rather than the Creator would not be rebuked, since whichever they served, they would not have departed from the same nature and substance. For just as no one can serve the Son who does not also serve the Father, because the substance of both is one, so no one could serve the creature without serving the Creator, if the substance of both were one. Hence, if you now discern and understand, you would see that there is a very great difference between creator and creature. And you must understand that the offspring of the Creator is not a creature; for if it were, it would not be lower but equal and of the same substance, and so whoever worshiped and served it would at the same time offer worship and service to its creator and father as well. But since those who worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator are rebuked by the apostle and held detestable, it is shown well enough that the substances of the one and the other are different. For just as the Son cannot be seen, that is, understood, unless the Father is understood in him (for he himself says, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father”), so the Son cannot be worshiped unless the Father is worshiped in him. And so, if the Son were a creature, he would not be worshiped without the Creator, nor would those be condemned who worshiped the creature rather than the Creator. So you now see, I think, that it does not suit you to call Jesus Christ the Firstborn of the most hidden and ineffable Majesty and King of all lights unless you cease to be a Manichaean, so as to distinguish the creature from the Creator; so that Jesus Christ is both only-begotten, according to his being the Word of God, God with God, equally unchangeable and equally eternal, not thinking it robbery to be equal to God, and firstborn of all creation, according to the fact that in him all things were founded in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible. For you recognize, I suppose, the words of the apostle to the Colossians.

Therefore, when I ask you from what the whole creation was made, which, though good in its own kind, is nonetheless lower than the Creator and changeable while he remains unchangeable, you will find nothing to answer unless you admit that it was made out of nothing. And so that creature can incline toward nothing when it sins, the portion of it which can sin, not so as to be nothing, but so as to have less vigor and be less firm. For if you carry having less vigor and less strength in thought to its end, nothing remains. So it loves vanity of its own accord when, abandoning the solidity of truth, it follows things of opinion, that is, changeable things. But when it pays the deserved penalties for this, it is subjected to vanity not of its own accord, as it is subjected in a sinning human being. For hence the apostle says: “Every creature has been subjected to vanity, not willingly,” because every creature is also in the human being. For there is in the human being something invisible according to the soul and something visible according to the body; and every creature is partly visible, partly invisible; but not every creature is in a beast, in which there is no intellectual mind. He says, indeed, that it was subjected in hope, because of the mercy of the one who sets it free through the forgiveness of sins and the adoption of grace. But if you will not admit that creation was made out of nothing by the Father through the Son in the goodness of the Holy Spirit (which Trinity remains always consubstantial, eternal, and unchangeable), good indeed but unequal to the Creator and changeable, you will certainly be forced to utter sacrileges: that God begot from himself something which is not equal to the one begetting and can be subjected to vanity; or, if you say it is equal, both will be changeable. What greater impiety than to believe and say this, and to prefer by perverse opinion to change God for the worse rather than to change oneself for the better by corrected reason? But if you fear to say that God is changeable, because it is truly a great and most manifest impiety, and say instead that the creature is unchangeable, so as to make it equal to the Creator and of one and the same substance, your own letter will answer you again. For where does that soul come from which you place in the midst of the spirits, to which you say its nature gave victory from the beginning, and to which you set a law and condition: that if it acts as one with the spirit of virtues, it will have eternal life with it and will possess that kingdom to which our Lord invites us; but if it begins to be drawn away by the spirit of vices and, after consenting, feels repentance, it will have a fountain of pardon for these defilements? When you recognize these words of your letter, you certainly recognize at the same time that you have made the nature of the soul changeable. For at one time to consent to the spirit of vices and again to feel repentance, what is that but to be changed now for the better, now for the worse? And the most manifest truth compelled you to say this. For your very soul, if you wished to pretend otherwise, would press you to notice its changeableness, and, having been changed so many times since you were born through various wills, teachings, forgettings, and consents, would become its own witness and would seek no proofs from outside.

Unless perhaps you think it helps you to say that the soul is unchangeable, because you added: “For it did not sin by its own will, but by the leading of another; for it is led by its mingling with the flesh, not by its own will.” In this statement you perhaps want it understood that the soul is unchangeable in its own nature but changeable in its mingling with another nature; as if the question were why it is so, and not that it is so. In this way the bodies of Hector and Ajax, and indeed of all human beings and animals, would be called invulnerable, if the blows and accidents by which a wound could be inflicted on them were absent. But surely the body of Achilles alone, whether by poetic fiction or by some more hidden power of things, was called invulnerable because it was not pierced even when weapons fell upon it; and in the part where it could be pierced, there it was certainly not invulnerable. So, if the soul were unchangeable, it would be changed by mingling with nothing, just as a body that is invulnerable is wounded by the touch or attack of nothing. So we, because we call the Word of God undefilable even when he took on mortal and vulnerable flesh, in order to teach us to despise both death and any bodily harms, are not afraid to believe that he was born of the Virgin; but you, because with impious perversity you believe the Son of God defilable, are afraid to entrust him to flesh; and yet, declaring that the nature of the soul is his substance, you assert that it is so mingled with flesh that you do not hesitate to think it changed even for the worse. Choose, then, what you want: either to say or believe that God is changeable, so that you likewise believe that changeable offspring was begotten from the substance of a changeable father (how great an impiety that is you certainly perceive); or to say that God is unchangeable, but that he nonetheless begot changeable offspring from his substance (and you see how impiously and absurdly that too is said); or else confess God unchangeable in such a way that what he begot from his substance is likewise not changed, and is equally the highest and most excellent good, and holds that same highest being in the same way with inviolable permanence; while the other, lower goods, which we call creation, he made not from himself (for then they would be equal), but, since they are good, he himself made them, and since they are not equal, out of nothing. If you believe this, you will not be impious; you will forget the Persians and you will be ours.

But the apostle says: “Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers,” who, by turning aside with ungodly will to the love of their own pride and honor, begrudge devout souls their return. But this is the difference between your opinion and our faith: you think that these same princes arose from some nature of their own, which God neither begot nor made but had adjoining him in eternal neighborhood, and that they made war against God and inflicted on him, before the mingling of good and evil, the first great evil of necessity, in that he was compelled to mingle his substance with them, to be afflicted and disturbed, changed in error and wholly plunged into forgetfulness of itself, so that it needed a liberator, corrector, reformer, teacher (you see how foolishly and fabulously this is said, and with how great a crime of impiety it binds one). But we have been persuaded through the Christian faith that nothing is contrary to God, who supremely is, except what wholly is not; and that whatever in any way is has from him who supremely is that it is in whatever way it is, and is good in its own kind, but some things are more, some less. And so all good things made by God the founder are ordered in fixed and distributed ranks: partly by intervals and positions of place, like all bodily things; partly by natural worth, as the soul is set above the body; partly by the deserts of rewards and punishments, as the soul is either raised to rest or subjected to pains. And so those princes against whom the apostle says we have a struggle suffer the penalty of their sins first, in order to do harm. For no envious one harms another without being first a torment to himself. The stronger harm the weaker; for no one overcomes another except where he is more powerful. Yet the wicked princes themselves are weaker than if they had remained in their original state and righteousness. But it matters in what respect anyone is stronger than another: in body, as horses than human beings; or in the nature of the soul, as the rational than the irrational; or in disposition of mind, as the just than the unjust; or in rank of power, as a general than a soldier or a provincial. And power is believed to be given wholly by the supreme power of God; often even to the worse over the better, that is, to the wicked over those who either already hold to righteousness or strive to attain it. For it is given so that those proved by patience may become manifest, either to themselves for hope or to others for imitation. “Knowing,” says the apostle, “that tribulation produces patience, patience proof, proof hope.” Of this kind of contest it is when a faithful person struggles against the principalities and powers of the transgressing angels and against the spiritual forces of wickedness, when they receive power to tempt and he commandments to endure; from which it comes about that they win in the lower thing and are defeated in the more powerful: they often overcome a weaker body and are overcome by a stronger mind. For against their force one fights with patience, against their snares with prudence, so that they neither bend us by compulsion nor deceive us by trickery into ruinous consent. And since there is a Power and Wisdom of God through which all things were made, therefore among the things that were made, when higher things incline toward lower (where all sin and all that is called evil is found), force imitates power and deceit imitates wisdom; but when those that had turned aside run back and return, greatness of spirit imitates power and learning imitates wisdom. Sinners imitate God the Father himself by ungodly pride, the righteous by devout generosity. Finally, the greed of the wicked and the love of the upright imitate the Holy Spirit. Yet both [cannot] depart from the imitation of God, from whom and through whom and in whom the natures themselves were made, but the one by vicious, the other by praiseworthy imitation. Nor is it surprising if, when those advancing and those falling away come into conflict, the imitation of those falling away is overcome by the imitation of those advancing; for the former are cast down by pride, the latter rise up by humility. And if it troubles you why those stronger in mind are weaker in body, it is no wonder that those set free by the forgiveness of sins are exercised by the mortality of the body, with whose immortality they will be crowned. For a punishment is not easily escaped unless the one released from it has overcome by merits. Hence the apostle: “But if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin, but the spirit is life because of righteousness. And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus Christ from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Jesus Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit dwelling in you.” So the mind, bearing mortal flesh because of the punishment of sin, if, changed for the better, it does not live according to the mortal flesh, both changes the flesh itself for the better and will deserve to have an immortal body; but this at the end, when the last enemy, death, will be destroyed, when this corruptible will have put on incorruption, not by that fabulous globe of yours, but by that change of which he says: “We shall all rise, but we shall not all be changed.” For when he had expressed it, saying, “And the dead will rise incorrupt, and we shall be changed,” he then went on to add, showing what change he meant, and said: “For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.” For he was treating the question of the body of those who rise, which he had put thus: “But someone will say: How will the dead rise? With what body will they come?” So read that whole passage attentively with devout care, not disturbed by obstinate contention, and with God's help your mind, needing no interpreter, will find nothing other than what I say. And then recall your mind to what we had set out to treat, and see now, if you can, that I am not saying that the righteous fight against nothing, but against those substances which fell away by not standing in the truth.

To fall away is not yet nothing, but to tend toward nothing. For when things that are more incline to things that are less, it is not the things to which they incline but those that incline which fall away and begin to be less than they were, not so as to be the things to which they inclined, but less according to their own kind. For when the mind inclines to the body, it does not become body, but by a deficient desire it becomes, in a way, bodily. So too a certain angelic sublimity, when it took greater delight in its own lordship in itself, inclined its affection to what is less, and began to be less than it was, and according to its rank tended toward nothing. For the less anything is, the nearer it is to nothing. When these fallings away happen voluntarily, they are rightly blamed and called sins; and when there follow upon these voluntary fallings away harms, troubles, pains, adversities, all of which we suffer against our will, then sins are certainly rightly either punished by penalties or washed away by exercises. If you are willing to look at this with a calm mind, you will surely stop accusing natures and charging substances themselves with crime. And if you want anything more fully and clearly explained on this matter, read our three books entitled On Free Choice, which you can find at Nola in Campania with Paulinus, the noble servant of God.

But now I must remember that I am answering a letter, though one much longer, with a letter. That is why I have not been silent on these matters in other works, so as not to be forced to say the same things everywhere. But I had promised to persuade you from your own letter how false are the things you have believed and how true is the assertion of the catholic faith. For certainly the whole difference between us is not that you say a certain substance is evil, while we say that evil is not a substance but an inclination from what is more to what is less. So hear this too. For you put in your letter, and say of the soul, that it is led to sin by mingling with the flesh, not by its own will. And there at once, I believe, when you saw that, if this were so, the almighty God would have to come to the aid of absolutely every soul and none at all ought to be condemned, since it would not sin by will (and once that was established, the sentence which Mani thunders terribly about the punishments of souls, even those coming from the part of light, would be overturned), you very watchfully added, saying: “But if, when it has come to know itself, it consents to evil and does not arm itself against the enemy, it has sinned by its own will.” It is good indeed that you at some point admit that it can happen that the soul sins by its own will; but to what evil, after all, does it sin by its own will if it consents? Certainly to that which you say is a substance.

But I already see three things; you too, I think, see them with me. For the soul that consents to evil, and the evil itself to which consent is given, are two. The third is the consent itself; for you do not say that this too is the soul, but that it belongs to the soul. Of these three, then, see: the soul is a substance; that evil too, by consenting to which the soul sins voluntarily, is a substance according to your opinion. So I ask what the consent itself is: do you say it is a substance, or is in a substance? For if you say it is a substance, you will think there are now not two substances but three. Or do you say two because the soul's consent, by which it consents to evil, is of the same substance as the soul itself? Then I ask whether this consent is evil or good. If it is good, the soul certainly does not sin when it consents to evil. But not only does the truth proclaim, you too write that it then sins by will. So this consent is evil, and therefore so is the soul's substance, if it is both the soul's substance and both are one substance. Do you see what you are forced into, so as to declare that the soul and that evil are no longer one good substance and the other evil, but two evil ones? Here perhaps you will try to attribute the blameworthy consent not to the soul that consents to evil, but to the evil itself to which it consents, so that in this way there can be two substances, one good and the other evil: the soul being said to be from the part of the good, while its consent, by which it consented to evil, and the evil itself to which it consents, are placed together on the other side, and both are assigned, not to the soul, but to the evil substance. Who could rave more absurdly? For the soul does not consent if the consent is not its own; but it does consent; so it is its own. Further, if the consent is its own, and this consent is evil, this evil is its own. For if this evil too belongs to that evil to which the soul consents, that evil did not have this evil before the soul consented to it. What sort of good, then, is the soul, at whose arrival that evil is either doubled or, to put it more mildly, increased?

Next, if this consent, which is agreed to be evil, is a substance, we find that it is in the soul's power that some evil substance either exists or does not exist, since this consent is in the soul's power. For if it is not, then the soul does not consent by its own will. But you said that it sins by its own will on account of this consent. So the soul has it in its power, as I said, that some evil substance either exists or does not exist. And what else is a substance but a nature? So there will be some nature which is neither natural to the soul, since, if the soul does not will it, it will not exist, nor to that evil to which the soul consents by will; for you cannot say that the evil is natural to the race of darkness which is established there by another's will, that is, by the soul's will. To what nature, then, will this nature be assigned, that is, this consent, if it is a nature, which is natural neither to the soul nor to the race of darkness, unless, to argue against Mani, you say that there are not two but three natures? For even if there were once two, now at any rate, after this consent arose, there have certainly become three. This third, born of the consenting soul and of the evil to which it consents, you are forced to call, as it were, the daughter of both. But since it was born of two natures, one good and the other evil, I ask why something neutral was not born; for just as what is born of a horse and an ass is neither horse nor ass, so what was born of a good and an evil nature, if it is itself a nature, ought to be neither good nor evil. But you admit that the consent is evil; for you say that the soul sins by its own will when it consents to evil. Or do you perhaps think that the good nature and the evil nature are like two sexes, male and female, so that, just as from male and female not something neuter but either a male or a female is begotten, so from good and evil you maintain that not some third thing, neither good nor evil, but the other, evil, was born? If so, where is that victorious nature of the soul? Was it so set aside that the other, good, was not born instead? Then do you not see that you are now speaking of different sexes, not natures? For if there were a diversity of natures between good and evil, nothing would arise from both but some third thing, which could be neither good nor evil; or else the mingling itself would be sterile, and no third substance would be produced from it. For if from those animals I mentioned above, when they mate, nothing is begotten but a male or female mule, which is neither the one nor the other, how much more should it have happened so in so great and extreme a diversity as that of good and evil? Or if no new nature arose from their mingling, it would not be evil, even if it could not be good. It remains, then, that we cannot avoid such incredible ravings unless we admit that that consent, which is agreed to be evil and blameworthy, is not a substance, but say that it is in some substance.

Next let us inquire most carefully in what substance it is. Although to whom is it not plain that, just as persuasion happens only in the one persuading, so consent exists only in the consenting nature? So when the soul consents to evil, it is itself a substance, but its consent is not a substance. You now see, I think, in what substance it is; that is, you surely see that this consent is in the soul, which consent you do not doubt is sin and therefore evil. From this you now understand that it can happen that in a good substance, such as the soul is, there is some evil which is not a substance, such as this consent is, from which evil the soul too is called evil. For a sinner is certainly evil; and it sins when it consents to evil. So one and the same thing, that is, the soul, is good insofar as it is a substance; but insofar as it has something evil which is not a substance, that is, this consent, to that extent it is evil. For it has this consent not from advance but from falling away. For it falls away when it consents to evil, and begins to be less and therefore to be less strong than it was while, consenting to nothing, it stood firm in virtue; certainly the worse, the more it inclines from what supremely is to what is less, so that it itself is less; and the less it is, the nearer it certainly becomes to nothing. For what becomes less tends toward not being at all; and although it does not reach that point, so as to perish utterly and be nothing, it is nonetheless plain that any falling away is the beginning of perishing. So open now the eyes of your heart and see, if you can, that any substance whatever is something good, and that therefore the falling away of a substance is evil, because it is good to be a substance; yet that not every falling away is blameworthy, but only the voluntary one, by which the rational soul, deserting its founder, inclines its affection to the things founded below it; for this is what is called sin. The other fallings away, which are not voluntary, are either penal, so that sins are punished by the supreme justice that regulates and orders, or they occur in the measures of the lowest things, so that the earlier give way to the later, and thus all temporal beauty is carried through in its turns and in its own kind. For just as speech is carried through by syllables, as it were, dying and rising, which are drawn out through fixed intervals of length and, their spans fulfilled, withdraw in the ordered succession of those following, until the whole utterance is brought to its end; and how long a syllable is lengthened or shortened, or with what form of letters each keeps the moments of its places, lies not in the running sounds themselves but in the speaker's control, while the art itself that makes the speech neither resounds with sounds nor is rolled along and varied by times: so by the rising and setting, departure and succession of temporal things, in fixed and definite stretches, until it runs back to its appointed end, temporal beauty is woven together. It is not evil because we can understand and admire better things in spiritual creatures; but it has its own grace in its kind, and it suggests to those who live well the highest wisdom of God, hidden on high above all the boundaries of times, its maker and regulator.

Come now, consider whether that which you called evil, by consenting to which the soul sins voluntarily, is some substance, or whether here too you cannot accuse a substance. For I ask what draws the soul to consent: does that thing rush upon it at random, and is the soul said to consent because it is moved by some delight in it to enjoy it? If so, it does not follow that the thing should be called evil because it is not loved rightly. For if I show that something is loved wrongly where the fault lies not with what is loved but with the lover, you will surely admit that the beauty of any thing is not at once vicious because the consent of one who desires it slips viciously toward it. How much this helps me will appear later. But to show what I promised, what should I choose rather, when an abundance of things flows around me? What, I say, should I choose rather than that which we praise as a heavenly creature, but you worship as a portion of the Creator himself? What among all visible things is brighter than this sun? Yet if someone desires its light immoderately, he brings quarrels upon his own eyes; and if he gets some power by which he can fulfill what he seeks, he smashes his neighbors' houses that stand next to his windows, so that the sun may flood his inner rooms from a more open sky. Is it then a fault of the sun that he so loved this light that he dared to put it before the light of justice, and, wishing to receive the light of fleshly eyes more abundantly into the dwelling of the body, shut the door of the heart and the gaze of the mind against the light of equity? You see, then, that a good thing can be loved with a love that is not good. Therefore, when you call that evil by consenting to which the soul sins, I call it good in its own kind, but such a good that it is not fitting for the soul, which is better, to consent to it. For since the soul is itself higher than the body and has God higher than itself, although the nature of the body is good in its order, the soul nonetheless sins and by sinning becomes evil if it joins to the lower body the consent of love which it owes to the higher God.

But if you say that you do not call it blameworthy consent when a thing is loved that does not act to get consent for itself, but that the soul consents when the one to whom it consents persuades or compels it to something, and that this is evil because it persuades or presses for something evil to be committed: that is a second question, and it too must be treated very soon in its order. But let us remember here first the sin which has, I think, been discussed enough, and it has become clear that it can happen that a thing good in its own kind is loved wrongly and, while the lover is blamed, the thing itself is not reproached. What then? If a soul already sinful and vicious through such love persuades another to the same sin, is not the soul that consents to the persuader corrupted by the same vice as the one it follows? So the first sin is to put a creature, however good, before the Creator in love; the second is to tempt another to do so as well, either by persuading or by compelling. For no one wishes to lead another into depravity who has not first been depraved himself. And those who sin wish to lead others into sin either from foolish goodwill or from malicious envy. For who advises his sons to think no gain shameful but to acquire ample money from anywhere, except by loving them perversely? He certainly does not hate them, and yet he persuades them ruinously. He himself is already corrupted by love of such things, although gold and silver are not evil, any more than that sun of which we spoke above; yet the disordered lover of a good thing is at fault. But by envy, when someone wishes another to sin, he loves honor with immoderate pride and longs to excel in it and to surpass the rest; and since he sees it bestowed more fully and more truly on virtues, lest he be surpassed in it, he longs for others to be brought down from the citadel of equity into the whirlpool of iniquity. In this way the devil tries to persuade or compel to sins. But is honor itself at fault because the devil, by loving it perversely and impiously, became impious? Or is the angelic substance of that same devil, which God created, evil because it is a substance? But when, deserting the love of God and turned too much toward his own, he wished to seem equal to him, he was cast down by the swelling of pride. So he is evil not insofar as he is a substance, but, since he was made a substance, insofar as he loved himself more than him by whom he was made; and he is evil because he is less than he would be if he had loved what supremely is. So falling away is evil. Every falling away, then, tends from what is toward not being, just as every advance tends from what is less toward being more. Indeed the highest honor, such as the devotion of the religious offers, is certainly owed to God. So one who loves honor imitates God. But humble souls wish to be honored in him, the proud in place of him. And the humble, toward God, become higher than the unjust, while the lofty, against God, become lower than the just, by that dispensation of rewards and punishments, because the former loved God above themselves, the latter loved themselves instead of God.

Now, I think, it is easy for you to understand from the very words of your letter, in which you said that the soul sins by will when it consents to evil, that no evil is an evil nature or the love of an evil nature; but that, since all natures are good in their own kind, evil is sin, which happens by the will of the soul when it loves the creature in place of the Creator, whether at its own prompting, when it is evil, or at another's persuasion, when it consents to evil. And nonetheless it also becomes evil in this way, by the punishments that follow, so that all things are disposed according to deserts by the supremely good Creator in a creature that is good but not supremely good, because he did not beget it from himself but made it out of nothing. But you have set up two natures, one of which you want to be good and the other evil, or rather one of good and the other of evil; for an evil nature comes even from a good one by sinning. Yet you admit that the nature which you call good does evil by consenting to evil, that is, sins by will. But I assert that both are good, but that one of them does evil by persuading, the other does evil by consenting. And just as the consent of the one is not a nature, so neither is the persuasion of the other; and just as the one, if it does not consent, will remain good, guarding the integrity of its nature, so the other, if it does not persuade, will be more upright; and if it too does not commit the sin which it does not persuade, both would be equally whole and praiseworthy in their own kind. For even if the one sins twice, which both commits and persuades, and the other once, if it only consents to doing evil, still they become evil by sins, they are not evil by nature. Or if that nature is evil because of persuasion, so is the other because of consent. But if persuading seems worse to you than consenting, let the one be evil and the other worse; yet let there not be such respect of persons, such unjust favoritism in judging, that when both sin, though one more gravely and the other more lightly, one is called the nature of evil and the other of good, and not rather either both good, but the one better that sins less, or both evil, but the one worse that sins more.

But, you say, where did the evil that is called sin come from, if there is no nature of evil? Tell me where that evil consent comes from in the nature which you grant and proclaim to be good. For whatever it suffers so as to consent to evil, it certainly would not suffer unless it could suffer. So I ask where it gets the very capacity to suffer; for it would be better if it did not have it. So it is not the nature of the supreme good, than which something could be better. Next, if it has it in its power either to consent or not to consent, then it does not consent because it is conquered. So I ask where it gets this evil consent, when no contrary nature compels it. But if it is compelled to consent, so that it is not in its power to do otherwise, then it does not sin by will, as you said, since it does not consent by will. But I still ask where the capacity to be deceived is in it, if it is deceived. For before it was deceived, unless it had in it the capacity to suffer this, it would never have suffered it. Though it does not consent in any way except by will; and if it is compelled, it should be said rather to yield than to consent. But by whatever name you call it, I ask of you, a sharp and skillful man with a Roman mind, as you boast, where this nature of the good gets the capacity to suffer what it suffers, so as to consent to evil. For just as in wood, before it is broken, there is fragility, without which it could not be broken at all, and wood is no less fragile if no breaker comes along, so I ask where in this nature there comes a certain fragility or flexibility before it is either broken by force or bent by persuasion into evil consent. Or if the fragility was already there through the neighborhood of evil, as bodies are often corrupted by the exhalation of a nearby marsh, then it was already corruptible, if the pestilent contagion of that neighborhood could corrupt it. So I ask where that corruptibility came from. Please pay attention to what I say, and yield to plain truth. For I do not ask where corruption came from (for you will answer, “from the corrupter,” and you will maintain that this corrupter is some prince of the race of darkness, so wrapped in fabulous coverings that one can hardly unwrap and grasp him), but I ask where corruptibility came from, even before the corrupter came; for unless it existed, either no corrupter would exist, or the approach of any corrupter would do no harm. So when you have found where this corruptibility in the good nature came from before it was corrupted by the contrary nature; or, if you do not want to say it was corrupted, where at least this changeableness came from before it was changed by hostile opposition (for a nature that becomes foolish from wise and forgets itself is surely changed for the worse; and you yourself added these words, saying, “if, when it has come to know itself, it consents to evil”; so it is changed for the worse when it forgets itself, so that it may know itself again when reminded; and it could in no way have been changed unless it was changeable before it was changed): when, then, you have found where this changeableness came from in the substance of the supreme good, before any mingling of good and evil had taken place, you will surely stop asking me where evil comes from. Although in the nature of the supreme good, if you think of it rightly, no changeableness of time at all can be found, either from itself or from the approach of anything else; [whereas] in that nature which Mani imagines and thinks to be supremely good, or even persuades those who believe him that it is, look and answer, if you can, where this changeableness came from, which was not found but betrayed when [the enemy] approached. For it could not be changed even by an enemy if it could not be changed at all; but since it could, it showed that it had not made itself unchangeable. So when this changeableness is believed to be in the substance of the supreme good, that is, in the substance of God, you see, if you are not contentious, with how great folly blasphemy is uttered. But when something of the kind is said of a creature, which God neither begot nor brought forth from his substance but made out of nothing, it is not the supreme good that is in question; but yet a good such that it could not be established except by the supreme good, which is God. For God, supremely and unchangeably good, made all things good, not supremely or unchangeably good, but good nonetheless, from the angels of heaven down to the lowest beasts and plants of the earth, all ordered in fitting places according to the worth of each one's nature. Among these the rational creature, when it clings to God its Creator, that is, its maker and founder, with the obedience of love, keeps its nature in his eternity, truth, and love; but when it deserts him in stubborn disobedience, it entangles itself in sins through its free choice, and through his just judgment it is made wretched by punishment; and this is the whole of evil: partly what it does unjustly, partly what it suffers justly. Do not ask me where this comes from, since you have already answered yourself when you said that the soul, when it has come to know itself, if it consents to evil, sins by its own will. See where evil comes from: from one's own will. And this is not a nature, but a fault, and therefore even contrary to nature, which it certainly harms by depriving it of the good by which it could have been happy if it had not willed to sin. You think this will to sin is moved in the soul only by another evil, which you believe is a nature that God did not make, and you maintain that the soul is the nature of God; and thus, if this nature of evil, whatever it is, produces this will in the soul by persuading it to sin, God is conquered and cast down into sin.

See with how great impiety, with what wicked and horrible blasphemies you are unwilling to strip yourself, by placing in a nature which God did not make life, sense, speech, measure, form, order, and countless other goods, and by placing in the very nature of God, before any mingling with evil, that changeableness by which he could be captured and because of which he was forced to fear, “seeing a great ruin and devastation threatening his holy realms unless he set against it some outstanding and illustrious deity, powerful in strength.” And to what end all this, except that that nature and substance of God should hold the enemy entangled and subdued in such a way that, sinning, it endures it, and, bound, does not wholly escape, and, once cleansed, keeps the conquered enemy shut in, and, condemned, keeps it enclosed? A fine excuse indeed you have found in your god, the necessity of war, against what is put to you for an answer: what was the race of darkness going to do to God if he had refused to fight it? If you say it would have done some harm, you will admit that God is corruptible and violable; but if you say that it could not harm him, you will be asked: why then did he fight? Why did he hand over his substance to enemies to be corrupted and violated and forced into every sin? Against this dilemma you have never been able to find a way out. You think you have found something great and safe when you answer by saying: it is a great iniquity to covet what belongs to others, and God would have given assent to this iniquity if he had refused to defeat the race that had dared it. This answer would have some color of justice if at least in that war the nature of your god had kept itself whole and unpolluted, and, mingled with hostile members, had done nothing wicked either under compulsion or by seduction. But since you say that, captured, it consents to such great crimes and outrages, and since finally you maintain that it cannot be wholly cleansed of that monstrous impiety, by which it even became an enemy to the holy light of which it is a portion, so that you believe the eternal punishments of that horrible globe are deservedly paid back to it: who does not see how much better it would have been to leave the hostile enemy in its iniquity, attempting empty things, than to hand over to it a part of God, whose strength it would drain, whose corrupted beauty it would join to its own iniquity? Who is blinded by such obstinacy as not to perceive, not to notice, with how much less iniquity the race of darkness would have tried in vain to invade a nature foreign to it, than God handed over his own nature to be invaded, forced into iniquity, and in some part even condemned to punishment? Is this, then, to have refused to consent to iniquity, and to have done so huge an iniquity without any necessity? Or was there a necessity, which Mani himself was not ashamed to say and you are ashamed to? For he says that God saw a great ruin and devastation threatening his holy realms unless he set against it some outstanding deity, powerful in strength; but you reason, of course, more sharply, as though if you said that God fought out of the necessity of preventing the race of darkness from harming him, you would be calling God violable and corruptible, able to be harmed by something if he had refused to fight. Drive away, then, and expel from your hearts and from your faith that very battle and the whole fable woven with the horror of ungodly and most unclean blasphemies, and at last anathematize and condemn it. For what kind of thing is it, I beg you, that, as was said before, you do not fear to call God a violable and corruptible nature, so that the nature of your god, if it could not exercise the strength by which it would not be captured, could not at least keep its justice as a captive, which Daniel could, whose lions you dared to mock? He did not consent to the iniquity of those by whom he had been led captive, but by his devotion, compelled by no terror, did not lose, in the condition of bodily slavery, the equity and freedom of a patient and wise mind. But the nature of God was led captive, was made wicked, cannot be wholly cleansed, is forced at the end to be condemned. If it knew from eternity that this evil would come upon it, no divinity was owed to it for itself. And if you said that the lands or regions of the kingdom of light and the race of darkness, adjoining each other as neighbors (which Mani recounts in a way that men of prudent understanding must laugh at), are indescribable, and that these are what Christ calls right and left, we know that Christ calls them right and left in such a way that he wants them understood not as bodily things, but as the happiness and misery of each one's desert. But your fleshly thinking does not withdraw from bodily places so far that you say this visible sun, and therefore bodily, which cannot be contained except in a bodily place, is both God and a part of God. But it is foolish to deal with you about these things. For what incorporeal thing will you be able to understand, who do not yet believe God incorruptible?

But, as a good friend, you kindly rebuke me for having left the Manichaeans and betaken myself to the books of the Jews. It is they that choke your error and deceit; for in them Christ was prophesied as the truth of God presented him, not as the emptiness of Mani invented him. But, most urbane man, you attack the ancient Scripture because it is written in the prophet: “And make children of fornication, for the land will commit fornication away from the Lord,” although you hear in the gospel: “Prostitutes and tax collectors will go before you into the kingdom of heaven.” I know where your indignation comes from: for it is not so much the fornicating woman in her fornication that displeases you, as that she was changed into marriage and turned to conjugal chastity, where you believe your god is bound by the tighter chains of flesh in the procreation of children; you think prostitutes spare him, because they take care not to conceive, so that, freed from the duty of childbearing, they may serve lust. For among you a woman's conception is a prison and chain of God. Hence you are also displeased by “The two will be in one flesh,” although the apostle commends this as a great mystery in Christ and the holy Church. Hence you are displeased by “Increase and multiply,” lest the prison houses of your god be multiplied. But I confess that I learned in the catholic Church that, just as the soul and the body, one of which is set over and the other subject, so the good of the soul and the goods of the body are only from the supreme good, from whom are all good things, whether great or small, whether heavenly or earthly, whether spiritual or bodily, whether temporal or eternal; and that these are not to be blamed because those are to be preferred.

And what you place among the things to be blamed, “Kill and eat,” is also set down spiritually in the Acts of the Apostles. Yet even bodily, it is not food that is blamed but luxury. Above all, to you who abstain even carnally from meat this saying ought to have been welcome, so that you might kill the animals and thus, its prisons broken, your god might escape from his wretched custody, and if any remnants of him remained there, you might purge them by eating them in the workshop of your belly. You mock that I grieved over Sarah's barrenness. I certainly did not grieve over it, because it too was prophetic. But it fits your fabulous sacrileges to grieve not over Sarah's barrenness but over her fruitfulness, because every woman's fruitfulness is a hard calamity for God. So it is no wonder that what was foretold of such people is fulfilled most of all in you: “forbidding marriage.” For you do not detest intercourse so much as marriage, since in marriage intercourse for the sake of propagation is not a vice but a duty; from which the continence of holy men and women is free, not because they avoided it as an evil, but because they chose something better. Although the very conjugal duty of fathers and mothers such as Abraham and Sarah were must be weighed not by human companionship but by divine arrangement. For since Christ was to come in the flesh, Sarah's marriage served the propagation of that flesh, as Mary's virginity did.

Hence too what you mentioned with praiseworthy ignorance, mocking it: “Put your hand under my thigh,” which Abraham said to his servant, asking for the pledge of an oath. “Put,” he says, “your hand under my thigh and swear by the God of heaven.” The servant swore by obeying, but Abraham prophesied by commanding, namely that the God of heaven would come in that flesh which would be propagated from that thigh. You spurn this, detest it, abominate it, chaste and clean men, who dread for the Son of God, whom no contact with flesh could change, a single womb of a virgin; and you entangle the nature of your god, changed and polluted, in the wombs of all females, not of human beings only but of beasts too. And so you who shudder at the one thigh of a patriarch, what thighs, I ask, will you find, I do not say of prophets, but of any prostitutes whatever, where you should not swear by your god, so shamefully fettered there? Unless perhaps you are ashamed not, indeed, to touch a member of the human body chastely, but to swear by a god so shamefully bound, a captive in such deformity there. By the name pancarpus, the show that is usually put on at public games, you attack Noah's ark because of the beasts of all kinds that were in it, the ark which, through every kind of animal, figured the future Church from all nations. There, whether without noticing or without knowing, I congratulate you on having used a fitting word; for πάγκαρπος is “all fruit,” which is spiritually true in the Church. And you do not notice how much happier Noah was with his family among those wild beasts, among whom he entered unharmed and from whom he came out unharmed, than your god, who was torn apart and devoured by the savage rage of the race of darkness. So he was made not a pancarpus but plainly a camparcus, torn apart by every savagery. You mock Jacob's wrestling with the angel, in which the future struggle of the people of Israel with the flesh of Christ was prophetically figured. But however you understand it, how much better would your god wrestle with a man than, conquered and captured, be torn to pieces by the race of demons! You falsely accuse Abraham of having sold his wife's chastity: there he did not lie that she was his sister, but by human caution kept silent that she was his wife, entrusting the preservation of her chastity to his God; for if he had not done what he could do, he would be judged not to trust God but to tempt God. And yet you do not look at your god, who did not sell his wife but gave his own members to enemies, for nothing, to be polluted, corrupted, and disgraced. You would certainly wish, if it were possible, that the illustrious nature of your god might return from its enemies as untouched as Sarah was returned untouched to her husband.

You praise my former character and pursuits and ask who suddenly changed me. Then, by circumlocution, you mention the ancient enemy of all the faithful and the saints and of the Lord Jesus Christ himself, by whom you certainly mean the devil to be understood. What shall I answer you about my change? Unless I believed it was made for the better in this way, I certainly would not have detested and condemned your error and betaken myself to the catholic Church and faith. Whether I did this rightly, that is, whether I was changed from evil to good, you yourself solve the question for me in the very word you used, my change. For my soul, if, as you say, it were the nature of God, could not be changed at all, whether for the better, as I trust, or for the worse, as you charge, either by itself or by the impulse of anyone else. So when I left that error and chose the faith in which the nature of God is devoutly believed to be wholly unchangeable, so that it may be wisely understood, my change displeases only those whom an unchangeable God displeases. And the devil is the adversary of the saints, not because he rises against them as an enemy from a contrary principle of another nature, but because he envies them the heavenly honor from which he himself was cast down. For, changed himself, he strives to change others. For as he is described by you in the long-windedness of that Persian fable, if he changes others without being changed, he is surely greater and the victor; but if, as you assert, he [is a lover] of the holy light, he is not an enemy of God but a friend; and is he better than those whom he deceives, he who makes them enemies of the holy light of which he himself is a friend? For Mani says that souls are to be condemned to eternal punishment in that horrible globe because they allowed themselves to stray from their former shining nature and then became enemies of the light; while he maintains that the very mind of the race of darkness, burning with love of keeping the light with it, created the bodies of animals. So take care to rescue yourself from these most empty and sacrilegious fictions, to be changed for the better with the help of him who is changed neither for the better nor for the worse.

“We have escaped,” he says, “because we followed a spiritual Savior. For so great was the boldness [of the enemy] that, if our Lord had been fleshly, all our hope would have been cut off.” If you say this because you do not believe that Christ had flesh, you ought not to place hope in Mani, whom you grant was begotten of male and female like other human beings and was in the flesh. Why then do you place so much hope in him? For in this very letter of yours, when you were trying to frighten me, you said yourself: “Who then will be your advocate before the just tribunal of the judge, when you begin to be convicted, with yourself as witness, of both word and deed? The Persian, whom you accused, will not be present. Apart from him, who will console you as you weep? Who will save the Punic man?” So you said that there can be no consoler and savior apart from Mani. How then, when you were dealing with Christ's sufferings, did you say that you escaped because you followed a spiritual Savior, namely so that the enemy could not kill him established in the flesh? So if the enemy killed your Mani, in whom he found flesh, so that he could no longer be your savior, how do you say, “Apart from him, who will console you as you weep? Who will save the Punic man?” You see what it is to be in heresy and in doctrines of demons, in the hypocrisy of liars. You want Mani to be truthful by making Christ deceitful: so that if Christ, in showing his flesh, death, resurrection, and finally the places of the wounds and nails which he showed to the doubting disciples, did everything deceitfully and falsely, then Mani spoke the truth about Christ; but if Christ showed true flesh, and therefore a true death, a true resurrection, true scars, then Mani lied about Christ. And so the difference between me and you in this case is that you chose to believe Mani truthful by believing Christ deceitful, while I chose to believe that Mani lied, about Christ as about other things, rather than that Christ lied about anything, how much more about that on which he placed the hope of believers most of all, that is, his passion and resurrection! For whoever says that when Christ, after what was thought to be his death, appeared to the hesitating disciples who thought they were seeing a spirit, when he said, “Touch my hands and feet and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have,” when he said to one of them who did not believe, “Put your fingers into my side, and do not be unbelieving but believing,” he was showing all this not truthfully but falsely: whoever, I say, says this is not a preacher but an accuser of Christ. But, you say, Mani preaches Christ and calls himself his apostle. That is all the more reason to detest and flee him. For if he said these things as an accuser, he could at least boast himself a lover of truth by exposing another's falsehood; but as it is, unknowingly and incautiously he betrays himself, and shows clearly enough to those who look carefully what he himself does and what he loves, by praising and preaching one who lies. So flee, friend, so great a plague, lest Mani, by deceiving you, want to make you a believer (which cannot happen) of the kind he wants that disciple to seem to have been made by Christ, to whom he said, “Put your fingers into my side, and do not be unbelieving but believing.” For as the sweetest truth understands it, what else did Christ say to the disciple but: touch what I bear, touch what I have borne, touch true flesh, touch the marks of true wounds, touch the true places of the nails, and by believing true things do not be unbelieving but believing? But as the sacrilegious emptiness of Mani understands it, what else did Christ say to the disciple but: touch what I feign, touch my deceit, touch false flesh, touch the deceitful places of false wounds, and do not be unbelieving toward my lying members, so that by believing falsehoods you may be a believer? Such are the believers that Mani, with his whole doctrine of lying demons, has.

Flee these things, I beg you; let not the appearance of being few deceive you, since the Lord himself said that the narrow way belongs to few. You want to be among the few, but the worst. For it is true that few are wholly innocent; but among the guilty themselves there are fewer murderers than thieves, fewer committers of incest than adulterers; and indeed the very fables or histories of the ancients have fewer Medeas and Phaedras than women of other crimes and outrages, fewer men like Ochus and Busiris than men of other impieties and crimes. See, then, that among you it is not the excessive horror of impiety that makes the merit of fewness. For such things are read, said, and believed there that it is a wonder that any, rather than few, rush into that error or remain in it. But the fewness of the saints, whose way is narrow, is set in comparison with the multitude of sinners; this fewness lies hidden among a much greater number of chaff, but on the very threshing floor of the catholic Church it is now to be gathered and threshed, and at the end to be winnowed and cleansed. To it you must betake yourself, if you desire to be faithfully a believer, lest, trusting in falsehoods, as it is written, you feed the winds, that is, become food for unclean spirits. For if the apostle Paul, whom you mention, counted as loss and dung, in order to gain Christ, not, as the wise do, the Scriptures of the Old Testament and that whole prophetic arrangement of words and deeds, but the fleshly excellence of Jewish descent, and the zeal to persecute Christians on behalf of the synagogues of his ancestral nation, which were straying and did not recognize Christ (a zeal by which he was inflamed as if it were praiseworthy), and the righteousness which is from the law, in which the Jews, not understanding God's grace there, proudly boast: how much more ought you to cast away, not as dung but as poison, those scriptures most full of abominable blasphemies, in which the nature of truth, the nature of the supreme good, the nature of God is described as so often changeable, so often conquered, so often corrupted, and in part inextricably defiled and at the end to be condemned by the truth itself; and, contention ended, pass over to the catholic Church and faith, which, as it was prophesied so long before, so was revealed in its own time! I say this to you because your mind is neither the nature of evil, which is nothing at all, nor the nature of God, otherwise I would speak in vain to something unchangeable; but since it has been changed by deserting God, and that change of it is evil, let it be changed, turned to the unchangeable good, with the help of that unchangeable good itself, and such a change of it will be deliverance from evil. If you spurn this admonition, still believing that there are two natures, one, a changeable nature of good, which, mingled with evil, could consent to injustice, the other, an unchangeable nature of evil, which, though mingled with good, could not consent to justice, then you are babbling that shameful fable just mentioned, which sows execrable and foul blasphemies in the fornication of itching ears, so that you may be in the flock of those of whom it was foretold that “the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires will heap up for themselves teachers, having itching ears, and will turn away their hearing from the truth and turn aside to fables.” But if you receive this admonition wisely, turned to the unchangeable God, by a praiseworthy change you will be among those of whom the apostle says: “For you were once darkness, but now light in the Lord.” This could not be said of the nature of God, because it was never evil and deserving of the name of darkness, nor of the nature of evil, which, if it existed, could never be changed and become light; but it was rightly and truly said of that nature which is not unchangeable, but, having deserted the unchangeable light by which it was made, is darkened in itself, and, turned back to it, becomes light not in itself but in the Lord. For it does not shine of itself, since it is not the true light, but shines illuminated by him of whom it was said: “He was the true light, which illuminates every man coming into this world.” Believe this, understand this, hold this, if you wish to be good by participation in the unchangeable good, which you cannot be by yourself; which you could neither lose, if you were it unchangeably, nor receive again, if you were not it unchangeably.